The town of Yachats on the Oregon Coast is a really wonderful place to be, and I had the opportunity to photograph there with several friends a month or two ago. The weather, I should add, was crazy, unseasonably cold, and even hailing at times. But that didn’t stop us from going out to make photos.

Ocean waves in Yachats, Oregon — Yachats Waves © Howard Grill

I tried a bit of compositing in the above photo. I had my camera on a tripod and shot the exact same scene several different times, as the waves and water obviously change from moment to moment. I also took several shots with the same overall exposure but different shutter speeds by using a neutral density filter. Looking through the photos, I found that I liked them all but liked some parts of each image more than the rest of the image and decided to make a composite.

If anyone is interested, this is how that can be done. I processed one of the images in Lightroom and then copied all of the image’s develop settings to the other four (all had the same overall exposure when taken). That way the photos would all be interchangeable in a sense, so that if a part of one photo is placed into another the overall exposure, contrast, color, etc will be the same. They were then brought into Photoshop using the ‘Open As Layers In Photoshop’ command so that they were all exactly aligned. Then, layer by layer, I could mask in or out the regions of each photograph to be included in the composite.

Don’t be yelling ‘foul’….it’s art, not photojournalism :)

For those who want to know, I am including below the original base photo that makes up the image as it came out of Lightroom. The color, contrast, and so on looks different from the final composite as it has not gone through my Photoshop processing. As you can see, I like bringing my photos into Photoshop from Lightroom with lots of room on either side of the histogram (low contrast) to give me greater latitude for Photoshop processing without the risk of blowing out the highlights or blocking up the shadows. I am simply including it for those that might have an interest.

Yachats Waves

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